Mothers and Sons
by Shadowsong1
Summary: A three-part story of how three mothers who lost their sons in the final battle of the war against Voldemort deal with their grief.


**Mothers and Sons**

**Disclaimer: **All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The plot is the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement intended.

* * *

**1: Eileen**

"You stupid fuck."

She stared at the simple, unadorned tombstone, just a name and dates of birth and death.

"You stupid, stupid, _stupid _fuck."

There were others there. She was rather surprised at how many. His surviving coworkers, past and present, several students and former students, and the entire Order of the Phoenix had all turned up to say farewell to a man that, scant weeks ago, most would have cheerfully slaughtered in his sleep. They all expected her to cry, to show some emotion at the loss of her only son. She didn't feel like crying. She felt like laughing. Hell, she felt _relieved_, to finally be rid of the child she never wanted, sired by the husband she learned all too quickly to despise.

It was different, in the beginning, when she first met Toby in that bar. He had wandered up to her, with a sly, quick grin, and asked if he could buy her a drink. She'd never been exactly the belle of the ball, and young men, perfect strangers, _virile _strangers, didn't make a habit of walking up to her in bars and offering to get her sloshed.

The fact that he was a Muggle, a complete and total unknown to a pureblood witch not quite out of her teens, only added to his charm.

And he _wanted her._

Drinks led to dinner, dinner led to dancing, dancing led to touching, touching led to kissing, and kissing led to fornication.

And fornication led her to this graveyard, staring down at her son's tombstone, willing herself to cry like she was supposed to.

She'd been seeing him for less than six months when Toby asked her to marry him. She'd eagerly said yes. Her father had been furious that _his daughter_ had given her bed and was to give her hand to a _Muggle_; her mother merely cried.

"You don't love him enough," her mother said.

"What the hell do _you_ know?"

"There's a _reason_ purebloods shouldn't marry Muggles, and it has nothing to do with blood. It has to do with _culture_. He comes from a different world. You don't love him enough to close that gap."

Or something to that effect. She'd laughed and laughed and laughed, convinced her father's ravings were nothing but the bigoted tripe she'd had to listen to all her life, and her mother's warnings were simply wrong. She _adored_ Toby. Sure, he had a temper. Sure, he drank too much. But he was charming when he was calm, brilliant when he was sober, and, more importantly, he was _hers_ and he _wanted her_ and she _wanted him_. His very differences only heightened the attraction. Culture shock wouldn't be a problem. Not for her and not for Toby.

Time proved how bitterly, bitterly wrong she was.

A few months into their marriage, every night at the dinner table became a sparring match. Toby was staying out later and later in pubs and bars, getting sloshed and getting fucked. And she waited at home, fuming and cursing the child she knew was growing inside her. She couldn't leave Toby with a fucking _baby_ on the way.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, _fuck_.

She took to thinking of her fetus as a demon, a chain binding her to a marriage with a man she despised.

After one particularly loud and violent shouting match eight months into her pregnancy, she decided that she would swallow her pride and admit that she was wrong to have entered into a hasty marriage with a temperamental drunken sot of a Muggle just because she _wanted_ him. If, of course, the child was a girl.

With contrariness he must have inherited from his father, the baby was a boy.

She cried when she was told that she had "been delivered of a healthy son!" The stupid doctor had looked at her strangely when all she did was cry, refuse to hold him, and repeat, over and over, "A boy needs a father!"

Her one chance—her _one chance_—to get out of her hellhole of a marriage with her dignity intact, and her stupid fuck of a son had ruined it.

Ah, yes. There came the tears. Tears of rage and the old, old regret: that she hadn't just aborted the pregnancy when she had the chance.

She stared at the tombstone. Today, less than a _week_ after the stupid fuck had gotten himself killed, would have been thirty-eight years exactly since he had become the last nail in her coffin.

Oh, it wasn't _all_ bad. The first few months after the baby was born, life became a little more bearable. Toby, shamed into a vague sense of sobriety by the responsibility he now had to his infant son, came straight home after work, instead of going to bars. They both made an effort to keep the fighting to a minimum. For the boy.

Of course, like the eye of any storm, this brief idyll of peace in her failed marriage passed all too quickly. Within a year, Toby fell back into his old habits. Once again, she began to resent the son for whom she had just learned affection.

All in all, she was a pretty terrible mother. The one line she never crossed with the brat was that she never, _ever_ hurt him physically. She preferred to ignore him, pretend he didn't exist. One thing to the boy's credit, he was smart enough to learn the way things were early. He avoided his father when the latter was drunk, and didn't get in his mother's way when he could help it. The child took to locking himself in his room or escaping to the tree house he'd built with that Muggle-born witch girl neighbor he was so obsessed with rather than spend any time at home. More than once, he spent the night up in the trees. Like the night Toby died.

She felt a swift stab of satisfaction, dreaming back on the night that bastard had died. She was careful to keep it off her face. It wouldn't do to be caught smiling with satisfaction at her only child's funeral, now would it.

Toby had actually come home in time for dinner that night. For the boy's fifteenth birthday. Six o'clock in the evening, and the bastard she'd wasted her life on was already trashed. Their son didn't notice, not at first. But halfway through dinner, not even the expert at denial she'd somehow managed to produce could hide himself from the truth. He rose to a magnificent fury—over what, she couldn't, for the life of her, recall—and screamed at his father. Toby, of course, screamed back. He threw the boy into a wall.

Or, rather, he _tried_.

There was an audible _bang_ as the boy's temper got the better of his not inconsiderable gifts and control, and _Toby_ flew backwards into the wall. The boy stared at him for a minute, deadwhite and shaking with rage, and ran out of the house.

And she had laughed and laughed and laughed.

Of course, this provoked another argument.

"Can't you _control_ him?" Toby had spat, once he'd extracted himself from the rubble.

She laughed in his face. "It's not my fault if your fifteen-year-old son can throw you into a wall."

He went purple with rage. "Like _hell_ it isn't, that bullshit comes from _you_."

"Don't even try that, this time it's all on you."

"Don't you _dare_ speak to me that way!"

"Do you really want to get thrown into the wall again?"

And he slapped her.

And she put her foot down.

And she drew her wand.

"_Imperio_."

The official story was that Toby had shot himself. Which was true. Perfectly true. For some reason, no one seemed to think there was anything odd about a man whose violence was always directed outward would suddenly turn his rage in on himself.

The boy blamed himself for months. He somehow developed the idea that his father had shot himself to one-up his son.

Of course, that delusion died once the brat really put his keen and penetrating mind to the task. Not many young wizards could brew Veritaserum before they took their O.W.L.s, but he had managed it.

She was almost proud of him, for the barest moment, proud of the boy's genius—her son's genius—staring down at the tombstone. "You wasted it, you stupid fuck," she murmured, almost fondly.

He drugged her and questioned her, and got the whole story; how she'd taken control of Toby's mind and commanded him to pull the trigger; how she'd never wanted him; and then she told him the truth she promised she'd never tell: that she wished she'd killed him before he took his first breath.

She stared morosely at the tombstone. She didn't regret telling him that, not exactly. He was bound to have found out somehow. Better for him to find out from her than anyone else. Or perhaps it was worse. Not that it really mattered.

After she said those words, he'd gone as deadwhite as he had the night of his father's suicide, and his eyes had gone blank. He stood up and, calm, so calm, left the house. He hadn't returned for hours. He hadn't spoken to her for weeks.

He drifted away from his childhood friend and (a mother always knows) sweetheart and towards other friends and idols.

She wondered which friends had led him to this tragic, stupid end.

"You stupid fuck," she whispered again. "You stupid, stupid, _stupid_ fuck."

She turned, the heel of her shoe making nearly no noise on the cemetery grass.

She walked away from her son's grave.

Still, no tears came.

Ah, well.

She no longer cared who didn't see her cry.

She wouldn't miss him anyway.


End file.
